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is leaking, then obviously there are some dangers associated with that. The long-term damage could be very severe. It is appropriate that leaking roofs are fixed. I would not be surprised if today it leaked just a little more, with the heavy rain that we had just prior to lunchtime.

When we examined the proposal carefully we found that no asset management survey of the building had been carried out and that this roof was being repaired in isolation, compared to the rest of the building; and we could not even work out what the alternatives were. There was a fairly offhanded comment given to us, namely, “It may well be that we use a Colorbond roof” - I think “Colorbond” was the word used - “and that could be much cheaper. Then perhaps we will not use $500,000; perhaps we will use $200,000”. But that was not fitted into any context; nor did it deal with problems such as, if you are going to use Colorbond, what does that do to the noise? If you are in a theatre and there is heavy rain and the noise disrupts the entire performance, that is hardly going to be a sensible way to deal with that kind of issue. So, we believe that that specific example gave us an insight into the failure of the Government to prepare proper proposals for the capital works program.

We are also particularly concerned that we could not tell which proposals had been eliminated and which had been given preference; all we had was the final say, “These are the ones that are left. Have a look at these. Do you like these; do you not like these?”. It was very difficult for us to tell why it was that the Canberra Theatre roof had priority over the building of a primary school at Nicholls; or why, within that area, that had priority over the building of a road, for example.

Yet another example that was of further concern to the committee was the unilateral decision by Mr Humphries to relocate the proposed Cultural and Heritage Centre from the North Building in Civic to an unspecified site elsewhere in Canberra; and the committee drew attention to that in its report. Certainly we know that, in answer to a question at question time yesterday, Mr Humphries indicated that he had an architect's report on that. As far as I am concerned, a single architect's report on how he might go about rebuilding and refurbishing the North Building is hardly the final say on that issue. What had happened was that a committee of this Assembly had considered these matters particularly carefully and had put forward a proposal which had been accepted by the Assembly as a whole. For a single Minister to then turn around and say, “No; we have done away with that now. We are thinking about doing it somewhere else”, is hardly a reasonable way to deal with things; it is hardly the approach of a consultative government. It would have been appropriate for Mr Humphries to say, “We have problems carrying that out because it does appear that it is going to cost us much more”, and then seek the opinion of the Assembly to see whether it would review its decision.

I, for one, am not ready to review my decision, because I think that what Mr Humphries seems to have lost in looking at a specific dollar criterion is that that committee was seeking to have this area in which the ACT Assembly sits seen as a cultural centre: The Canberra Theatre, the ACT Assembly, and, in the North Building, a further cultural centre. What the committee was looking to do was to try to get the heart of Canberra re-established in arts terms. I see Mr Wood agreeing that that was the intention of that committee at the time.

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